Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (23 page)

Soter clapped his hands together. “Enough about that. We can give you the full tour later, but for now let us focus on the task at hand.”

He leaned over one of the computers and inserted a flash drive into the USB port. After a few keystrokes, he stepped back and gestured for Jenna to sit.

As the screen began to fill up with data, ones and zeroes on one side, and an endless string of just four letters on the other, Jenna felt a growing apprehension. Those numbers and letters were the blueprint for creating her, transmitted across space by some unknown alien intelligence. She wanted to turn and run, but instead, as if compelled by an invisible force, she took a seat and began to read.

46

10:24 a.m.

The computer hard drive whirred as it struggled to download and open the enormous file. Jenna recalled learning that the entire human genome could be expressed in less than a gigabyte of drive space. That had probably seemed like a mountain of data in 1977, but by modern computing standards, it was the same size as a two hour movie. It was a little disconcerting to think that a person—and not just any person, but Jenna herself—could be reduced to bits and bytes of information. As she scanned the procession of letters—A,T,C and G—she found herself wondering which part had determined her hair color? The color of her eyes? Which parts made her into the unique entity that she was?

Only I’m not unique, am I? There are others out there, others like Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu, and God only knows how many more.

No, not God. Soter knows
.

“Ideally, I would ask you to read the entire message, but at over three billion characters, that would require weeks of reading, even with your extraordinary mental abilities.” Soter said the last bit as if speaking from experience.

So the others have read the message
, Jenna thought, but Soter was still speaking. “Once the file finishes loading, you can skip to the end. That is where the ‘signature’ is located.”

Despite his admonition, Jenna found herself fascinated by the contents of the file. She scrolled down a page, reading every single number and letter on the screen, downloading it into her brain almost as fast as the computer could read it from the flash drive. As she read, she began to get the sense that, with just a little more information, she might be able to interpret what she was seeing.

As a young girl, she had once seen an advertisement written in Spanish. She had not learned how to speak that language—though she later would—but she remembered it, just as she remembered everything she saw and heard. When the opportunity arose to get a translation, she saw the sign again in her mind’s eye, perfectly comprehensible. That was how she felt now. Even though there was only an endless stream of letters, not divided by spaces, punctuation or any sort of pattern that would be recognizable to the average person, she felt sure that with just a little bit more knowledge, she would be able to read it from her memory like a book.

Page down.

Page down.

Page down.

She scanned faster and faster…two pages per second…three. Yet, as Soter had indicated, the file was enormous, and the scroll bar registered no visible movement with each click. The file was over three million pages long, and even if she had been able to read five pages per second, it would require seven days of non-stop reading to finish.

“There,” Soter announced. “It’s finished. You can skip to the end. It’s still in binary I’m afraid. We were never able to differentiate values. But I believe you will see the pattern.”

Almost reluctantly, as if scrolling to the end of the message would be like skipping to the last page in a mystery novel, Jenna did as Soter suggested. The computer lagged in protest at the size of the file, and another interminable wait followed before the screen filled up again. Here, there were no corresponding letters of the DNA sequence. Only ones and zeroes.

This new message was different somehow. With the genetic information, even in binary, she knew there was a purpose and pattern to it all, but there was no contextual framework for the last part of the message. Though she recognized the digits, their random arrangement left her feeling muddled. She struggled to read the numbers. When she was done, she discovered she could not recall them with any degree of confidence. They had slipped from her memory. It was a new experience for her. She tried reading it again.

00000011110000…

As she fought through the message a third time, the individual numbers fell out of her consciousness as quickly as they left her sight. She paused reading, but didn’t look away from the page as Cray approached Soter and whispered in his ear. From the corner of her eye, she could see Soter’s look of alarm, but it wasn’t quite enough to draw her away from her task. She returned to reading. The numbers were almost hypnotic in their slippery resistance to assimilation. She kept looking, afraid to even blink, lest the message disappear or change.

Jenna had not truly appreciated how unique her gift of memory was until a classmate had challenged her to ‘prove it.’ She had always assumed that lots of people possessed eidetic memories, but later research had revealed that even among those who claimed to possess the gift, there were limits to the ability. No one truly possessed what was mistakenly termed ‘photographic memory’ or perfect recall. And yet, she always had. She could read something and remember it line by line, or recall startling details from images or places she had visited, without any effort.

Only now did she realize that she had taken the ability for granted. It wasn’t just that her memory was letting her down. Her brain seemed to be lagging, just as the computer had when loading the file.

000000111100001001000010100000…

Soter gave a low harrumph of displeasure, then followed Cray to a side door that opened onto a balcony just outside the control room. The rumble of the transmitter increased again, but was oddly muted by the rain.

“Stay where you are!” Jenna recognized the voice as Soter’s, though his strident shout was different than his soft conversational tone.

“I’m unarmed.” The answering voice was barely audible over the tumult of the transmitter, but there was something familiar about it. The magnetism of curiosity pulled at her, even as her eyes refused to let go of the strange numerical sequence.

000000111100001001000010100000111110001010001101000010100…

“What do you want?” Soter called.

Like a stubborn puzzle piece finally oriented correctly, the pattern emerged.

000000111100001001000010100000111110001010001101000010100100010101000111111001000100011110001000100010110100010011100010000001010100001010100001001100001100000000001000010001100100011101000110000001001000010000001101100010110000010111100011100000100011000000110100001000000001010001010000001111000011001000011001100000001011000100011010001101000111000001100000011010001000000001000000000111010001000100001000101000001000000001011000010000001011100010101000100001000010001000100110001011100011011000100010001000000001000000100101000101100000100101011111001110001100000001111000011100000110000010001000010011000111010001101000110010000111010000000011100001110100010000010000001101000101100010110000111100001000100001100010000001000000101000110000011010001010000110100011111000111001000110100010001111000011101000110100011100000100100000100011000100111000111111000000011110000100100001000000011000110110001011000010100100011000100010110000010010000111100010001111100011011000101000110110001001100001101000001111000001110010001010100010001011000111000011101000100100001111000110010001100010010100010001000011010000111100010000100000000101100001011000011010001100010001101110001010000111100001111000100001111000110100001011000010111000101100000100010000

The numbers locked themselves into Jenna’s consciousness, and with that realization, a door opened in her mind. Yet as she mentally stepped toward that door, she heard the distant voice answer Soter’s question.

The spell broken, she surged to her feet and crossed the room in three steps, heedless of Mercy’s cry, “Jenna, no!”

Some part of her wondered if Mercy had heard as well, and if the purpose for her warning was to safeguard Jenna’s emotional health as much as her physical. It was a fleeting thought. No force on Earth could have stopped her.

She burst out onto the balcony, right behind Soter. Cray saw her and made a half-hearted attempt to restrain her, but he was already too late. Jenna’s eyes met those of the man who had just a moment before shouted: “I want to talk to my daughter.”

Standing on the rain-soaked grass less than fifty feet away was Noah Flood.

47

10:27 a.m.

Jenna had not thought it possible for her world to be shaken any more than it already had, but Noah’s appearance was another roller coaster plunge into the impossible.

Rivulets of rain dripped from his hair and nose. His eyes found her and his craggy face broke into a relieved smile. His lips formed her name, but she couldn’t tell if he had said it aloud.

A dam broke inside her. Every emotion she had experienced in the last two days in connection with this man—admiration, grief, rage, acceptance—deluged her. She wanted to scream at him for taking away an existence that had never truly been hers. She wanted to rush down the fire stairs and hug him, and never let go.

My daughter
.

That was what he had said, and she desperately wanted to believe he felt that way. And yet, the very fact that he was here, that he had tracked her down, told a different tale. He was working with Cort. It was the only explanation. And that meant he was trying to draw her out so that the government agents could finish their deadly assignment.

She searched his face, looking for some hint of what to believe, knowing even as she did that he was too skilled in the arts of deception to ever reveal the truth. A thousand questions ran through her mind, but all she could say was, “I thought you were dead.”

His smile became a grin. “I’m too ornery to die,” he called back.

Jenna realized now that her assumption about his fate had been made at the start of the nightmare, when all she knew about violence was what she had seen in Noah’s movies, where people dropped dead from a single gunshot, because that’s what the script called for. Her own experience had revealed just how much punishment a human body could actually take, yet at no time had it occurred to her that Noah’s wound might have been only superficial.

Soter turned on her. “Go back inside, Jenna. This man is not your father. He’s here to kill you.”

Noah spoke quickly. “Jenna, you have to listen to me. I know what you’re thinking, but remember what I taught you. Listen to your gut…”

“But make up my own damn mind,” she finished, repeating it like a mantra. Her guts were so twisted, she had no idea what they were trying to tell her.

“He hasn’t told you the whole truth,” Noah continued.

And just how would you know that?
She didn’t say it aloud, and despite the fact that she did not want to trust this man who had lied to her about everything, she knew he was right. Soter was holding something back.

“He told you some story about aliens with a message of peace, right? There are no aliens, Jenna. He lied to you about that.”

Jenna shook her head. “He wasn’t lying.”

Noah inclined his head. “Okay, not lying. Maybe he believes that’s what happened, but it’s not the real story. That message didn’t originate from deep space. It was from Earth, bounced off a piece of orbiting space junk.”

“Preposterous,” snarled Soter. “Who’s trying to deceive you now, my child?”

“The Soviets created the whole thing as a disinformation campaign. They wanted us chasing our tails, wasting resources looking for aliens where there weren’t any. And it worked. He spent millions—the equivalent of billions today—on a hoax.”

“A hoax?” Soter was incredulous. “A hoax that contained the entire human genome more than a decade before geneticists were able to even begin unraveling the mysteries of DNA?”

“You saw what you wanted to see,” Noah countered, then turned his gaze back to Jenna. “But that’s only half of it. His clones—Jenna, it kills me to say it—they’re not stable. There’s something
wrong
with them.”

He kept speaking, talking over Soter’s protest, pushing past the unpleasantness of his revelation the way a parent tears off a Band-Aid in one quick jerk. “I know you know about this Jenna. About the SARS virus in China and the cyber-attack here in America. The DNA recipe he cooked up gave the clones extraordinary abilities, but it also took something from them, something that made them human.”

“You don’t think I’m human?” Jenna’s voice sounded very small, as if her breath could not quite get past the hurt and rage she now felt. She was angry at Noah for saying such horrible things, but she was also very afraid because she knew he wasn’t lying.

“Oh, Jenna.” Noah’s pained look appeared genuine. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You have to believe that. We can get through whatever comes. I believe that, and I want you to believe it, too. But you have to know the truth, and he’s not going to tell it to you.

“It’s something that happens to the clones when they reach adulthood. It’s like a switch gets thrown. I’ve seen the evidence, heard from the people who worked with Jarrod Chu and Kelli Foster. They changed.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s like something was hardwired into their DNA. It’s in you, too.”

Like a switch gets thrown
.

The words slammed through her and brought to mind Soter’s reluctant explanation of his plan to show her the signature portion of the message.

Seeing the message for yourself might have a stimulating effect on that part of your brain where the genetic memory is stored.

It was important to allow your abilities to fully develop…to reach maturity
.

She could not tell if Noah was being truthful, but Soter was an open book, and she saw the truth of the accusation in his eyes. He seemed on the verge of boiling over with righteous indignation, but his expression told a different tale.

He knows
.

And I read the message
.

Unbidden, the entire binary sequence flashed before her eyes, a siren song in ones and zeroes, irresistible.
Look
, it sang,
all you have to do is look, and all will be revealed
.

Jenna’s knees went weak, and she staggered back against the wall. Through the rush of blood in her ears, she heard Soter’s insistent denial. “It’s not true, Jenna. He’s lying.”

Even in her state of shock, she knew that it was Soter, not Noah, who was hiding the truth, and not just from her.

He must have known all along that there was something defective in their—in our—DNA. No wonder he kept going, year after year, tweaking the genome, trying to figure out why his ‘children’ were turning into sociopaths
. She doubted that it was Soter’s intention to unleash monsters on the world. He seemed to care only about making contact with the extraterrestrial architects of the message.

Noah was wrong on that score. The signal wasn’t a Soviet-era plot. It was far too sophisticated, even by twenty-first century standards. It was most certainly the product of a very advanced intelligence, probably an alien intelligence, and that meant its potential for disaster went far beyond anything dreamed up during the Cold War. The message was a trigger, activating the mental equivalent of a computer virus that lay dormant in the genetic memory of the clones. That’s exactly what she and her siblings were: a dormant virus, sent in a radio transmission, designed to crash the entire planet.

Jenna wondered if it had been a similar incident fifteen years earlier that had prompted Noah’s mission to terminate Soter’s project with extreme prejudice. Had a first or second generation clone read the message and then tried to destroy the world?

It’s in me
, Jenna thought again.
Even now, it’s trying to burn its way through my mind.

What will happen if I let it? Will I still be me?

She pushed away from the wall, took a halting step toward the balcony rail, and addressed Noah. “Are you here to kill me?”

“Never.” Noah shook his head vehemently. “They wanted me to. They’re terrified of what you might do, but I convinced them to give us a chance.”

“A chance?”

“Don’t trust him,” Soter repeated. “He’s a killer. He killed your brothers and sisters. He killed my friends. He’ll say anything to stop you from fulfilling your destiny.”

“My destiny?” she repeated, incredulous. Soter’s words were a slap in her face. “Is that all you care about?”

The mathematician realized his mistake. “Of course not.”

“He’s right, you know. That message that you care about so much? It’s an alien Trojan Horse, and you brought it right inside the gates.”

Soter shook his head. “No, no. It’s not true. We just had to refine the genome.”

Noah spoke again. “Jenna, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I will be there for you. I won’t leave you, and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Jenna felt utterly alone. She wondered what Mercy would do in her situation—Mercy who clearly thought of Soter as a father, and yet had defended Noah, even when Jenna had been ready to reject him completely. But Mercy was still in the control room, and Jenna knew that if she stepped back inside, it would be the same as choosing Soter’s path. Besides, while Mercy might have been able to advise her about which man to choose for a father, she could not understand what was truly at stake.

If I choose to go with Noah, I might get killed. If I stay with Soter, I might destroy the world
.

Not such a tough choice after all
, Jenna thought, and started moving.